


You Are The House I Occupy

by tothevictorgoesthespoils



Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-29
Updated: 2015-03-29
Packaged: 2018-03-20 04:57:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3637587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tothevictorgoesthespoils/pseuds/tothevictorgoesthespoils
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Like a haunting herself, it is the absence of Vincent Phantomhive that Rachel has found herself treading through, day by day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Are The House I Occupy

Like a spectre, Rachel always thinks she catches glimpses of his dark tresses and pale skin out of the corner of her eye in the bedroom, in the foyer, in the garden. Like a haunting herself, it is the absence of Vincent Phantomhive that Rachel has found herself treading through, day by day.

By the second week of solidarity she has dismissed the servants, and with Tanaka with Vincent in London she can feel the dust settle into her lungs as she runs her finger over the smoky surface of the mantle. She smells the musk and does not allow Ciel to enter his father’s library because the dust will suffocate him to death. She does not indulge herself with the irony. 

His library, vast and filled with musk makes her head spin and her eyes water. When she married Vincent, she thought his library was inclusive of their namesake, a testament to their bloodline and wealth. It was an heirloom fitting of an Earl. There are texts that were salvaged from the Fire at Alexandria, alchemical tests that still smell like saltpeter, tomes from saints from the dark ages.

She realized half a year into their marriage that Vincent lived here. Before she came in and claimed a bedroom for their family, Vincent would fall asleep by candlelight on the lush leather chair by the tall windows. This is where she has always found him when he thinks he has snuck away without notice, where she finds him with his coat tossed to the side, perched elegantly up on the ladder and reaching for tomes that were older than her own bloodline. 

He would smile when she would always catch him and for her sake he would never admit how much he missed the silence, and for his sake she would only smile back and act if she was as ignorant and unobservant and dutiful as he must have mistaken her for sometimes.

This was his earthly respite, and who was she to disturb it? She was raised to be a better wife than let her husband know how transparent he was about his worries, and Vincent was a better husband than to show the panic that grew day over day over the wellbeing of his wife and child. 

She still smells him in here, the ink, the gun powder, the mint here lingers like he is standing behind her with a small but benevolent smile and his tired eyes. She feels his warmth in here, sees his fingerprints imprinted on the edges of shelves. She knows which books he has cracked open because he never bothered tucking them in completely with the rest.

She thinks she feels his breath tickle the loose hairs curled beneath her ear, but it is just a draft because Vincent is far, far, away and she and Ciel are at the manor, without Tanaka, without warmth. Vincent has left her once again to roam. Rachel walks through what feels like Vincent Phantomhive’s earthly mausoleum and runs her finger down the rigid spine a leather book. When she closes eyes, it feels like her fingers are tracing over the rigid bumps of his vertebrae like she does on the nights when he is home, and the nights when Ciel is asleep, and the blankets do little to keep the heat in around them. 

If she closes her eyes, the soft leather feels like his skin, and she remembers Vincent sleeping on his stomach, the rare occasions when his eyes are closed and he lets her run her fingers over his shoulders, into the dip of his back with light touches and willowy fingers. 

She slowly pulls the book out of where it is nestled on the self. Her nostrils are invaded by something masculine, the smell of smoke and cloves and mint and something so irrevocably him. And there it is, that subtle, subtle note of decay that she catches when she cracks open the book and the spine creaks with its pages warped with age and stuck together.

(She smells this decay sometimes, only sometimes, when Vincent leans over with arms wide and kisses her on the cheek, and then moves to her neck and she knows that he is in a rush to get to the bedroom and forget about what in God’s name had happened earlier that day, or week, or month that he has been gone.)

There is a delicacy, in how fine and thin and elegant the pages are. (Because at other moments Vincent is all easy, and warm and affection, and the perfect gentlemen that proper and meticulous breeding and circumstance can only dream to replicate.)

She notices that the book has been handwritten with fine ink, most likely before the invention of the printing press. There are ink stains and the faint marking of margins, so the scribe knew when to move on to the next line. (How Vincent is cautious, calculating, reserved, how Vincent always knows to assess and measure.)

The pages are translucent, like how Vincent’s neck is so pale that even in the moonlight Rachel make out the faint hughes of blue and purple that show through like spiderwebs on his wrists. She feels for the soft texture of the pages like she runs the pads of her fingers over the paint blushing lines on his throat, over his pulse. 

The pages are crumbling, and they are in a language Rachel does not recognize and will never probably know. There are holes and imperfections, moths most likely, like the jagged and ugly bullet wound on his shoulder to the right of collar bone. An ink stain that reminds her of the slight pigmentation on his abdomen from what he said was a knife. 

There is mold on one of the pages, and she sees the spores traveling to and infecting the others, moving deeper into the spine, just like how she catches Vincent just staring at her and Ciel with something inexplicable and shadowed. And sometimes, she hates herself for it, she thinks that there is something about Vincent Phantomhive that is like the plague, that will rot and decay each page in a text or volume like this one page at a time, from the inside out. 

She sighs at herself and reminds herself that these are not the thoughts and fears of a proper wife, she reminds herself that she stronger than this, that she is more fearless than anyone around can presume. She tucks the book back into its spot, and turns.

There are empty spaces further along in the shelves, where volumes should have been. Aesops Fables is missing from its normal place, there was a collection of Edgar Allen Poe’s poetry that has only left a empty and cold slot in its wake. Vincent takes these books, and they never come back. She only wonders and she knows that she will never ask, and when he is gone she stares into the empty spaces, geometric and hollow, and wonders what of him he will leave behind next as well. 

Rachel haunts his library with warm blood and drawn breath, and Vincent haunts her with his absence. Vincent Phantomhive is a ghost, shackled and in chains, and wanders through each section of her heart like a force of nature that she will never understand but will always unconditionally love because he is a phenomena.


End file.
